She must take off her jacket and belt, empty her pockets, and leave behind phone and bags before she is allowed through. These include leg irons, an executioner's dummy, a rope made of bed-sheets and a dictionary hollowed out to accommodate a mobile phone.Ĭonscious of its role in the imprisonment and execution of Irish heroes, including Kevin Barry, she finds it unsettling that the place is still being used as a place of incarceration. She meets Seán Reynolds, the prison official in charge of curating the artifacts stored in the jail's museum. Murders, both politically-motivated and domestic, executions at Kilmainham Jail and daring prison escapes are all part of her sometimes lurid, always fascinating narrative.Įxecution chambers are the most disturbing places in her itinerary around the island of Ireland, and Mountjoy Prison left an indelible impression. She looks at the enduring maritime dramas of the Lusitania and Titanic disasters, which took a huge toll of life in the early years of the twentieth century. Thus Gillian O'Brien's slow-burning eureka moment, leading to her 360-page work which intrigues with fascinating details on the Irish way of death, the blood sacrifice and the forbidding locations of execution. 't took a move to Liverpool, marriage to an Englishman and attendance at some English funerals to make me fully aware that the Irish fascination with dark side of the story was not shared across the globe.' Gillian O'Brien investigates the dark, often macabre side of Irish history through famine, maritime disaster and the strictures of incarceration in her fascinating new study.

Blood Runs Green by Gillian O'Brien